The only full day that I’m spending in Kyoto, and I wanted to visit the Fushimi Inari shrine - the shrine with a thousand gates, or Torii. I’ve got lots of recommendations for going as early as possible, as it gets really busy, so I set off to go to the shrine at around 7 AM.
The way up wasn’t packed, but most of it was busy enough to have to stop to wait for people to take their photos at times, but there were often stretches where there was no one in view. I brought my camera to take some photos, and once I got back to the hotel to rest, I was very happy with the results - 470 photos.
There are moments where the path branches off, sometimes up the mountain towards the summit, and multiple observation decks - the first one is around a quarter of the way up, and is where a lot of the visitors are satisfied with the climb and turn back. Carlos wasn’t a particularly athletic person, and would very probably be happy to turn back at that point as well - I was happy to continue to the summit, and even went on a separate trail that goes around the summit from the north of the mountain. In that trail, the forest path had the sun play with the leaves of the tall trees, to form dramatic light shafts in the thin fog of the forest, or Komorebi.
In a sense I feel like this experience would be different had Carlos joined me to go. I don’t know if he would have gone all the way up to the summit, but I went and brought his memory up there anyway.
The experiment I chose to play with was something that I wanted to create the sensation of passing under Torii with - one specific experiment that Carlos made that plays with the concept of a tunnel created by a cutout shape. The shape in Carlos’s sketch was generated from a mathematical description - a hexagon cutout into a rotated square. I changed mine to become a Torii - I picked a SVG available online and used svg2p5 with a few editions to the SVG so that the tool would work.
Musical inspiration:
GRIS is a game that deals with grief, and although with a specific tone and approach that centers on the grief of a woman, I tried playing through the game again some time after Carlos passed. I can’t express how deeply the experience touched me, even as I played the game to completion years ago.
Of media/games that deal with grief, I can think of two other masterful takes, which touched me so deeply that I take as inspiration about how to approach expressing deep and resonant emotions: Outer Wilds and Journey - I think I will return to those in other remixes. Especially Outer Wilds.